Animating objects on a path

- While now we know that we can apply animations to objects to add some visual interest to our slides, so it could be a text box or any other object, for that matter. We can even apply multiple animations, including a new one here in Storyline 2, a motion path, that's what we're going to explore now. We're gonna go to slide 1 of our Employee Orientation scene, and that's our Welcome slide that we've already applied an animation to. We can see the star there. Then down below, when we select it, you can see it's taking up the entire duration of the slide, so the word Welcome appears there, and the animation is to grow for two seconds of that.

Now, let's change this to something different. Let's change it to a spin. We'll choose Spin and we'll bump it up to 2 seconds again. Now we're going to apply a second animation, which is to have that spinning Welcome move around our slide. That's a motion path. Over here on the ribbon, you can see there is a Motion Path dropdown. We can select it, choose from some presets. Want it to move in a straight line, great. Or use an Arc, a Turn or follow a shape, we could do that, too.

Or a little further down, create a Custom one, a Custom S Curve, a Freeform or even a Scribble. A scribble lets us click and draw exactly the path that we want this object to follow. Let's choose Scribble. There's our pencil. Now, we can have this start right off the screen if we wanted to. I'm gonna go way out here, click and drag, and have it move around off and back on to the slide right there. Now, when we let go, don't worry about what you see here. We've created the path.

You can see the start, the green arrow where it's going to start, and over here, can't really see it, is a red arrow where it's going to end. But we can move this entire frame by going to the border. When you see the four-sided arrow, just move it so that end point is right where the word Welcome appears currently on our screen, right there, great. So there's that red arrow I was talking about. That's the center of the word Welcome and that's where it's going to finish. Now, we have two animations applied to the same object for the same duration. Notice that the default is 2 seconds here as well.

We could bump both of these up or down. By having them exactly the same, we're gonna see a spinning motion while it moves along this path, creating a cool-looking effect. Let's preview it by clicking the Preview dropdown arrow and choosing This Slide. Takes a moment to prepare and then off it goes. So you could see it spinning and moving along that path. Kinda cool. We'll close up the preview, and if we go to the Effect Options for the entrance animation, notice we could maybe change it to Counterclockwise.

That might be a better effect for the motion path that we're taking. Preview again by clicking the dropdown and choosing This Slide. Think about something that's round and the cool effect you could create, having it go perhaps in a straight line while it's spinning, like a rolling wheel. You can create some cool animation effects by combining animations, including this new one, which is to add a motion path.